BRAVO! Exactly. You've hit the nail square on the head. It's the same situation where I work. Our IT manager locked the entire network down. All access to the net is via a filtering proxy (which also logs on a per-user basis). You have to log into the server before you can even access the white-list websites. Corporate wallpaper. ScriptLogic freakin' with your machine on login. Restrictions-akimbo. Nasty.
I'm in the IT department for support, as well as the company's only developer. I can safely say if I wasn't helping the company so much (and didn't like the MD's style so much) I'd be long gone. Call me a crazy creative artist type, but having someone standing behind me saying "don't go there...don't click that...don't view this" doesn't increase my productivity one jot. Apart from the fact it's easily defeatable (outbound SSH access isn't touched, so I can route my traffic via a tunnel if I wanted), having it in place tells me "you're not trusted". If the company can't trust me, how can I trust them? It's a tricky one.
So if your job doesn't require you to look out of the window, you don't need a window? Or, if your job doesn't require you a comfy chair, you should sit on a box?
Somethings are part of a job, others are part of the environment. IT rules for developers are part of the environment, not the job. Windows and comfy chairs are required to maximise peoples' productivity. Being able to change your wallpaper or surf slashdot is required, by some, to maximise their productivity.
I'm in IT support, and I completely understand your issues. I know a user can gum up a machine in seconds if left unattended. I also know that different departments have different mindsets when it comes to technology. Good salesmen, when given an inch will take a mile. Let them surf the net at work, and they'll be looking at allsorts and downloading everything in sight. Developers are a different breed. They'll just look at what they need to get their job done, and slashdot (:-P). Different departments need different levels of protection. Sales/receptionists/admin = high protection. IT = low protection.
I feel quite passionately about this, as the current company I work for has me wearing a tie and not surfing slashdot during the day. Well, at least today I'm wearing a tie.
Right one to take? Ask the tens of thousands of families in Iraq who've lost loved ones over the last year, and are still being shot at by overzealous guys in uniform. Now, those guys have better boots and bigger guns. They're also worse at restoring power and water, and can't tell the difference between a normal iraqi and a militiaman. Right course to take my ass. If you really believe that, I pity you. Turn off Fox.
So we're supposed to believe linux's video codec support is better than windows'? You've never heard of directshow filters, have you? Windows dynamically selects the most appropriate filters to render the video/audio/subtitles/whatever. You have complete control over these filters, by the way. If you want to convert an MP3 to a wav file, you can drag'n'drop these filters in the right order, and it'll convert the format for you. It even gets new codecs off the net automatically. Windows provides that functionality to any application that asks for it. That's right - one single, solid way of processing multimedia in your computer. Not tens of individual packages and bits of software loosely tied together to work. If you're going to bitch about windows, at least pick an area it doesn't trounce Linux on. sheesh.
Apart from it choking macs with not much memory, to the point where neither OS9 or OSX ran properly when used together. Genius. Sticking two operating systems on one install and calling it "cross compatibility" is not clever.
IE loads slashdot almost instantly too, and doesn't mess up the rendering. It's done that for years. I don't mind people taking the mick out of IE (heck, I expect it!), but credit where credit's due. IE has consitently been a very fast browser, and extremely forgiving when it comes to large or strangely-coded HTML documents. Obviously, its security features are poop, but that's another story.
Well, fox says it's fair and balanced, yet has staunchly-republican hosts and guests. That's not fair and balanced in anyones views. Sure, you can blame it on liberal perception, but it clearly isn't. In fact, fox is likely to get its license revoked to broadcast in the UK, as it's clearly not fair and balanced. No other news channels in the world have had that, not even al jazeera. go figure.
You're confusing socialism with communism. Socialism works, and works well. It seems because "socialism" is a bad word in the US, people are still wandering around saying it's rubbish and doesn't work. Well, to instantly prove that's incorrect, just look at Europe. Many socialist states doing well. Some better than the US. Go figure.
Capitalism doesn't exploit human nature for all society - it exploits human nature for those with enough money to influence people. If capitalism was so good for everyone, the US would have no poor people.
Socialism doesn't fail because it "leaves a vacuum of power". Socialism doesn't fail, but peoples' support for it does. Socialism asks people doing well to help people doing less well. If the person doing well is selfish, they say "no" and instantly become republicans. Socialism, if anything, is a true expression of human nature. Caring for your fellow man. Capitalism is self-serving and not caring at all.
I seriously can't believe someone still thinks socialism is a bad thing, or that it can't succeed. Wow.
You don't have to use it defensively, remember. If you want to take a building in tact, and without killing anyone (not the US's cup of tea, I know), you could use these weapons with great effect. The SAS train how to take buildings using batons. They were deployed during a prison riot, and took the whole prison in minutes using only their batons. No fatalities.
Let's not get all misty-eyed here... Linux is far away from offering the one-stop-shop solution windows does. All the effort that goes into linux is spread among the different distros and competing apps (which often do the same thing). Microsoft has a huge, dedicated team of developers working on Windows. They don't have conflicts of ideology, and so they effectively work together. All their effort is put into driving one product in a single direction. That fact alone means any windows OS is going to make more progress than the Linux equivalent. As linux is still behind windows on lots of desired functionality (speed of many popular apps, games, drivers, etc), it has to work even harder than windows to catch up.
I want to have an alternative to windows, but at the moment there isn't one. And the ones that could beat windows are slipping behind even more. Say what you want about Office, but the open source alternatives aren't as fast, don't provide the support they want, and aren't 100% compatible with everyone else's.
This still doesn't fix the problem of games under linux, unless someone's managed to port DirectX 9 and hardware-accelerated drivers for the major graphics cards...
But if linux is going to topple windows, it has to be a game box. It has to have the flexibility a windows box does. You can throw anything at windows, and it's cool. From business apps to media creation to games to video to whatever. It works out of the box, and does everything you want. For linux, it's a completely different story...
Exactly - they spend $4000 on a computer, then use it to write a word doc. Great use of technology and money. That's the problem - they spend all that cash on something that looks good and is rather functional, but ignore the functionality so they can wave their macs around like it makes them better people. That, to anyone in IT, is funny. Kind of like buying a ferrari and using it as a table. "it's so pretty!"
Yeah - I use RH9 too. It can't do much out of the box. Its video support is terrible, and it doesn't play games. Great. That's most of the home market not catered for.
I don't have a problem with RH9s functionality, but I know people who don't know about shell scripts are going to be a bit phased when a package gets upgraded and breaks a dependency. Things like that put people off. It's no big surprise. There's no arguing about it - RH9, and indeed every linux distro - is absolutely awful for playing games on. Most people who buy PCs want to play games on them. They won't use linux.
You don't get those errors! My XP machine doesn't reboot itself randomly. It doesn't do anything strange at all. I have an XP box under my desk at work that hosts our intranet. It's a P4 2.4ghz, and it's been running for over 50 days solid, being hammered by a floor of salesguys from 8:30am to 6:30pm. By your (and every other sensationalist zealot on here) logic, my box shouldn't have an uptime of over 30 minutes. That's CLEARLY not the case.
You can do anything on XP and it doesn't reboot or crash. I've installed hardware, software, patches, whatever and it just purrs along. If you don't have that stability, may I suggest fixing your computer, as it's obviously faulty. Do you have an AMD?
My system restore works fine. Every new driver install creates a restore point, which I can roll back to if the driver fails. My XP boxes don't crash. Dodgy CDs just don't read - they don't stall the machine.
Windows XP isn't as bad as everyone on here says it is. Every single time someone comes up with something bad XP does, it's instantly attributable to something dodgy that user has done, not the OS itself. Be it ridiculous driver installs, or just old hardware. XP, on a well-configured machine, runs like a dream. There's no denying that.
That's what Linux looks like to windows users. Sure - every part of it is conceived with great care and is perfect in what it does, but stick them all together and it looks like someone was sick on a radiator.
Don't get me wrong - linux is cool (using it right now), but to get windows users across, it has to be just as easy and capable out of the box as windows, which it isn't by a long shot.
I agree with you for production servers - I always use linux for that at work. At home, however, my MySQL/Apache/PHP/SSH/FTP servers all run under windows. They're also the same versions that run on linux, and are 100% compatible. My windows box is rock-solid, and I can play games on it.
I'm not having a go at linux, but windows is more capable than most people think. It's come a long way.
Constant crashes? Can you PLEASE put that old-ass dig to bed. XP doesn't crash. I've not had a crash on my PCs for months and months and months. I mean seriously - it harms the linux community when people, supposedly IT-savvy, keep banging on about crashing when it just isn't true any more.
The very fact that linux needs sites like this just to get newbies up and running speaks volumes. Don't try and cover up the symptoms, but get to the cause.
Maybe this is part of the problem. If there was a standard linux kernel, and a standard linux GUI, there would be a standard linux for people to move to. As there is, there are currently hundreds of variations to use. Of course people aren't going to give up their windows boxes (after you've learned one windows app, you've learned 'em all) for something that's going to act completely unpredictably across the board. It's simply too much to ask of someone who just wants to use their computers for pr0n.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm in the IT department for support, as well as the company's only developer. I can safely say if I wasn't helping the company so much (and didn't like the MD's style so much) I'd be long gone. Call me a crazy creative artist type, but having someone standing behind me saying "don't go there...don't click that...don't view this" doesn't increase my productivity one jot. Apart from the fact it's easily defeatable (outbound SSH access isn't touched, so I can route my traffic via a tunnel if I wanted), having it in place tells me "you're not trusted". If the company can't trust me, how can I trust them? It's a tricky one.
Somethings are part of a job, others are part of the environment. IT rules for developers are part of the environment, not the job. Windows and comfy chairs are required to maximise peoples' productivity. Being able to change your wallpaper or surf slashdot is required, by some, to maximise their productivity.
I'm in IT support, and I completely understand your issues. I know a user can gum up a machine in seconds if left unattended. I also know that different departments have different mindsets when it comes to technology. Good salesmen, when given an inch will take a mile. Let them surf the net at work, and they'll be looking at allsorts and downloading everything in sight. Developers are a different breed. They'll just look at what they need to get their job done, and slashdot (:-P). Different departments need different levels of protection. Sales/receptionists/admin = high protection. IT = low protection.
I feel quite passionately about this, as the current company I work for has me wearing a tie and not surfing slashdot during the day. Well, at least today I'm wearing a tie.
ICL was bought out by Fujitsu years ago, fyi. Loads of their machines are still in use today.
Right one to take? Ask the tens of thousands of families in Iraq who've lost loved ones over the last year, and are still being shot at by overzealous guys in uniform. Now, those guys have better boots and bigger guns. They're also worse at restoring power and water, and can't tell the difference between a normal iraqi and a militiaman. Right course to take my ass. If you really believe that, I pity you. Turn off Fox.
Not to mention US bullets flying through their windows...
So we're supposed to believe linux's video codec support is better than windows'? You've never heard of directshow filters, have you? Windows dynamically selects the most appropriate filters to render the video/audio/subtitles/whatever. You have complete control over these filters, by the way. If you want to convert an MP3 to a wav file, you can drag'n'drop these filters in the right order, and it'll convert the format for you. It even gets new codecs off the net automatically. Windows provides that functionality to any application that asks for it. That's right - one single, solid way of processing multimedia in your computer. Not tens of individual packages and bits of software loosely tied together to work. If you're going to bitch about windows, at least pick an area it doesn't trounce Linux on. sheesh.
Apart from it choking macs with not much memory, to the point where neither OS9 or OSX ran properly when used together. Genius. Sticking two operating systems on one install and calling it "cross compatibility" is not clever.
IE loads slashdot almost instantly too, and doesn't mess up the rendering. It's done that for years. I don't mind people taking the mick out of IE (heck, I expect it!), but credit where credit's due. IE has consitently been a very fast browser, and extremely forgiving when it comes to large or strangely-coded HTML documents. Obviously, its security features are poop, but that's another story.
Well, fox says it's fair and balanced, yet has staunchly-republican hosts and guests. That's not fair and balanced in anyones views. Sure, you can blame it on liberal perception, but it clearly isn't. In fact, fox is likely to get its license revoked to broadcast in the UK, as it's clearly not fair and balanced. No other news channels in the world have had that, not even al jazeera. go figure.
Capitalism doesn't exploit human nature for all society - it exploits human nature for those with enough money to influence people. If capitalism was so good for everyone, the US would have no poor people.
Socialism doesn't fail because it "leaves a vacuum of power". Socialism doesn't fail, but peoples' support for it does. Socialism asks people doing well to help people doing less well. If the person doing well is selfish, they say "no" and instantly become republicans. Socialism, if anything, is a true expression of human nature. Caring for your fellow man. Capitalism is self-serving and not caring at all.
I seriously can't believe someone still thinks socialism is a bad thing, or that it can't succeed. Wow.
You don't have to use it defensively, remember. If you want to take a building in tact, and without killing anyone (not the US's cup of tea, I know), you could use these weapons with great effect. The SAS train how to take buildings using batons. They were deployed during a prison riot, and took the whole prison in minutes using only their batons. No fatalities.
I want to have an alternative to windows, but at the moment there isn't one. And the ones that could beat windows are slipping behind even more. Say what you want about Office, but the open source alternatives aren't as fast, don't provide the support they want, and aren't 100% compatible with everyone else's.
This still doesn't fix the problem of games under linux, unless someone's managed to port DirectX 9 and hardware-accelerated drivers for the major graphics cards...
But if linux is going to topple windows, it has to be a game box. It has to have the flexibility a windows box does. You can throw anything at windows, and it's cool. From business apps to media creation to games to video to whatever. It works out of the box, and does everything you want. For linux, it's a completely different story...
Exactly - they spend $4000 on a computer, then use it to write a word doc. Great use of technology and money. That's the problem - they spend all that cash on something that looks good and is rather functional, but ignore the functionality so they can wave their macs around like it makes them better people. That, to anyone in IT, is funny. Kind of like buying a ferrari and using it as a table. "it's so pretty!"
And you're disproving that how, exactly??
I don't have a problem with RH9s functionality, but I know people who don't know about shell scripts are going to be a bit phased when a package gets upgraded and breaks a dependency. Things like that put people off. It's no big surprise. There's no arguing about it - RH9, and indeed every linux distro - is absolutely awful for playing games on. Most people who buy PCs want to play games on them. They won't use linux.
You can do anything on XP and it doesn't reboot or crash. I've installed hardware, software, patches, whatever and it just purrs along. If you don't have that stability, may I suggest fixing your computer, as it's obviously faulty. Do you have an AMD?
Windows XP isn't as bad as everyone on here says it is. Every single time someone comes up with something bad XP does, it's instantly attributable to something dodgy that user has done, not the OS itself. Be it ridiculous driver installs, or just old hardware. XP, on a well-configured machine, runs like a dream. There's no denying that.
Whatever, buddy. Seriously. Come to think of it, I'd expect to hear a mac fanboy say that :)
Don't get me wrong - linux is cool (using it right now), but to get windows users across, it has to be just as easy and capable out of the box as windows, which it isn't by a long shot.
I'm not having a go at linux, but windows is more capable than most people think. It's come a long way.
Constant crashes? Can you PLEASE put that old-ass dig to bed. XP doesn't crash. I've not had a crash on my PCs for months and months and months. I mean seriously - it harms the linux community when people, supposedly IT-savvy, keep banging on about crashing when it just isn't true any more.
The very fact that linux needs sites like this just to get newbies up and running speaks volumes. Don't try and cover up the symptoms, but get to the cause.
Maybe this is part of the problem. If there was a standard linux kernel, and a standard linux GUI, there would be a standard linux for people to move to. As there is, there are currently hundreds of variations to use. Of course people aren't going to give up their windows boxes (after you've learned one windows app, you've learned 'em all) for something that's going to act completely unpredictably across the board. It's simply too much to ask of someone who just wants to use their computers for pr0n.